Milos' Cave — The Neverending Game
The doorbell makes a sound effect.
Not a ring — a sound effect. Something from a game I half-recognize, a little ding-ding-ding that belongs in a dungeon loot drop, and I'm still processing this when the door swings open and Milos is standing there in a hoodie that hasn't been washed since the second Trump administration, Monster Energy in hand, eyes already glazed with the particular luminescence of someone who has been staring at screens for six consecutive hours.
"Bro," he says. "Come in. I just installed the sickest GPU."
He waves me in with the can. Spills a little. Doesn't notice.
I step into darkness.
Relative darkness — the cave kind, the kind that has its own light sources: LED strips lining every horizontal surface, cycling through neon blue, pink, purple, casting the whole room in the color of a migraine that decided to have a good time. Three monitors on the desk, stacked and angled like a cockpit. Towers of game cases — physical media, which means Milos is either a purist or has never heard of digital downloads, I'm not sure which is more alarming. An unmade air mattress in the corner with a controller resting on the pillow like a teddy bear. A battlefield of empty cans — Monster, Rockstar, a discontinued flavor of G-Fuel — arranged in no particular order except the order they fell.
The TV across from the mattress is on. Screensaver, idle, something slow and looping.
The TV is unplugged.
I look at the cord on the floor. Look at the screen. Look at Milos.
"Your TV's —"
"Yeah it does that," he says, already at the desk. "Don't worry about it."
He boots up something multiplayer. Doesn't ask if I want to play — just tosses me the second controller the way you toss someone their keys. Reflex. You catch it.
"Stay over," he says, settling into the chair that has permanently molded itself to the shape of him. "I promise — time flies."
"That's what I'm worried about," I say.
He grins. Full face grin, unhinged and genuine, the grin of someone for whom consequences have always been a tomorrow problem.
"Exactly," he says.
For a while — it's just fun.
I'll say that. I want to say that, because it's true, and the truth matters: for a while, it is genuinely, uncomplicatedly fun. Milos is a menace with a controller in his hand — fast, chaotic, trash-talking in three languages simultaneously and making none of it make sense in any of them. He calls a guy a "certified NPC behavior haver." He rage-quits and rejoins in the same breath. He explains a strategy using a metaphor about cheese that I follow completely and cannot repeat.
I laugh until something in my chest loosens.
It's been a while since that happened.
We play. Time passes. I stop checking my phone because my hands are full and because there's always one more round, one more match, one more okay but wait we have to avenge that one, and the LED lights cycle through their colors and the cans accumulate and somewhere in the back of my brain a clock is ticking but it's quiet back there, it's manageable, it's —
I look at the actual clock on the wall.
1 a.m.
Huh.
Milos is locked in. Eyes slightly bloodshot, jaw set, fingers moving with the precision of someone who has spent approximately ten thousand hours developing this specific skill at the cost of all others.
"We should probably —" I start.
"One more," he says.
One more.
I blink.
The clock says 4 a.m.
The math on that is wrong. The last time I checked it was 1 a.m. and I have been awake and present and I did not fall asleep, I know I didn't fall asleep, and three hours do not pass in a blink —
Milos is still playing.
Same posture. Different game, maybe, or the same game in a different round, it's hard to tell, the screens blur together after a while into the same general texture of motion and noise and neon.
"Dude," I say. My voice is rough. "Shouldn't we sleep?"
He doesn't look away from the screen.
"You can if you want," he says. "But the queue never ends."
I rub my eyes. Press the heels of my hands against them until I see pressure-dark. Count to five.
Open them.
The windows — the one small window, above the monitor stack, which I had previously registered as showing nighttime — are showing something else.
Grey. Pre-dawn grey. The specific colorless light that exists between night and morning, that brief episode of the day that feels like the world rebooting.
I stare at it.
"Milos. Did we — did I fall asleep?"
"Nah," he says. Click click click. "You were right there."
"Then why is it —"
"Sun rises fast," he says. "Time flies, bro. I told you."
He says it like it's a feature.
I find my phone under a bag of chips.
Forty-three unread messages. I stare at the number like it's in a foreign language. Forty-three. People don't — I don't get forty-three messages unless something has —
I look at the date.
I look at it for a long time.
I look up at Milos. He's still playing. The screen light catches the side of his face — hollows out his cheeks, makes his eyes bright and blank, like a deep-sea thing drawn up to the surface.
"Milos," I say carefully. "What day is it."
He shrugs. His shoulders move without interrupting his hands. "Does it matter? We're winning."
His voice is distant. Not unfriendly — distant the way a radio is distant when the signal's going in and out. Like part of him is here and part of him is in there, in the screen, in the game, in the queue that never ends.
"The date on my phone," I say, "is two days later than when I got here."
"Yeah," he says.
Just — yeah.
I wait for more.
Nothing comes.
The controller in my hand feels heavier than it did.
I stand up.
My legs are stiff, that particular ache of sitting too long, too still, bent the wrong way. I stand and look for the door.
The wall where the door was is — LED strips. A shelf of game cases. A poster for something I don't recognize. I walk toward it anyway, press my hand against the wall.
Wall.
Just wall.
I turn around slowly.
Milos is watching me.
Not playing anymore. Just sitting in his chair, controller in his lap, watching with those bloodshot eyes that are somehow also completely calm. Like he's seen this before. Like this is the part of the night he's been waiting for.
"It's fine," he says. "No one's looking for you."
"Forty-three messages, Milos —"
"Old ones," he says. Dismissive. "From before."
"Before what —"
"Before you stopped checking." He shrugs again. "They stop eventually. Everyone stops eventually."
I look at my phone. The messages are there — names I know, real names, people who exist outside this room with its recycled air and its LED lights and its unplugged television playing a screensaver on no power source I can identify.
"I have to go," I say. "I have training tomorrow. I have — I have a life, Milos —"
"Life?" He looks at me. Not unkind. Genuinely curious, like I've used a word he's heard before but hasn't thought about in a while. "Bro. This is life."
He gestures at the screens.
Three monitors. The glow. The queue.
And something in his face when he says it — something underneath the unhinged grin, underneath the Gen Z shrug, underneath the whole menace, society danger, Alkmaar's biggest problem bit — something in his face when he says this is life is so tired, so genuinely, bone-deep tired, that I stop moving.
"Milos —"
"You want another round?" He picks up the second controller. Holds it out. "One more. You'll feel better. You always feel better when you're playing."
"That's not —"
"You stop thinking," he says. Quiet now. The trash talk gone. "You stop thinking about whatever it is. For a while, you just — " he looks at the screen. " — you're just in it. You're not anywhere else. You're not anything else. You're just — here."
He says here the way Sven said still.
Like it's the only thing worth being.
"Come on," he says. "One more round."
I don't take the controller.
I stand there and I look at him — really look, past the hoodie and the Monster and the three-day-old vibe — and I see it. I see what the cave is. What it's for.
The LED lights so you don't notice there are no windows. The queue that never ends so you don't have to decide to stop. The second player slot always open, always waiting, because it's less lonely with someone else in the loop. The screensaver on the unplugged TV, running on nothing, going nowhere, cycling through the same images because that's all it knows how to do.
Milos knows what he's running from.
He just never told anyone what it was.
And here's the thing about Milos — the real thing, the one underneath the menace and the unhinged gamer bit and the certified society danger — he's been running hard for a long time. Long enough that the running has become its own destination. Long enough that stopping would mean arriving somewhere he doesn't want to be.
"Then you're braver than me," he says.
Quiet. Tired. True.
The saddest thing he's ever said, in the flattest voice, like he's just reading the stats off a screen.
I see the EXIT sign by accident.
Small, red, tucked behind a shelf of games I've never heard of — indie titles, weird names, the kind of games you find at 4 a.m. when you've finished everything else. The sign is dusty. It looks like it's been there a long time without being used.
I push the shelf aside.
The door is behind it.
Real door. Handle, hinges, the works.
"Milos —"
He's already turned back to the screen. Queue loaded. New match. His hands find the controller the way hands find things they've done ten thousand times.
"Gg," he says. "Come back sometime."
"You should sleep," I say.
"I will," he says.
He won't.
I push through the door.
Darkness.
Then the street. Cold air, pavement, the sound of a distant tram and a bird doing its morning thing in a tree somewhere overhead.
I stand on the step outside Milos' front door and breathe and look at my phone and the date is — fine. The date is fine. One night. Just one night. The forty-three messages are real but spread across one normal night of being unreachable, not two missing days, not a temporal anomaly, just forty-three messages from a group chat that doesn't know the meaning of the word chill.
Just one night.
I put my phone in my pocket.
Look back at the house.
The small window above the desk — I can see it from here, just barely — is still glowing. Blue-pink-purple. The screens still running.
He's still in there.
Three days later I have the urge to go back.
Not for any good reason. Not because I miss Milos specifically — I see Milos, he's fine, he's exactly the same, he told me about a Valorant match at lunch in perfect detail and then halfway through I realized the match hadn't happened yet and when I pointed this out he shrugged and said "it'll happen though" — not for any reason I can name or justify.
Just.
The pull.
The specific gravity of a place that asks nothing of you. Where you don't have to be anywhere because the queue is always loading, where the time goes somewhere else without you having to watch it go, where you can sit in the blue-pink-purple dark and be nobody for a while.
The urge to come back.
And keep coming back.
I don't go.
I sit with the urge instead. Let it be there. Look at it the way you look at something you've found in your own house that you don't remember buying.
This is mine? This feeling is mine?
What are you running from, exactly?
I don't answer that. Not out loud. Not even in my head, not all the way.
But I stop walking toward the bus stop that goes to Milos' street.
I find a different one.
Some people drown in their memories.
In the replaying. The loop of the thing that happened, the thing they said, the thing that can't be taken back. Over and over. The same match, the same loss, the same screens showing the same outcome in high definition.
Others drown in forgetting.
In the finding of something — anything — loud enough and fast enough and bright enough to fill the space where the memory would be. The queue that never ends. The round that becomes the next round. The can that becomes another can.
Either way you disappear.
Milos knows this. I think he chose his kind of drowning on purpose. I think he looked at the alternative and went: nah. Too loud in there. Too much. Give me the game. Give me the screen. Give me the neon and the noise and the next round.
I don't blame him.
I understand it, which is the part that scares me.
The cave is always going to be there. The door is always going to be open. The second controller is always going to be in the other hand, waiting.
One more round.
You'll feel better.
And the worst part — the part I turn over and over when I can't sleep — is that he wasn't lying.
You do feel better.
For a while.
And then you look up and the sun is rising and you've been gone for two days and your phone has forty-three messages and Milos is still in his chair, exactly where you left him, and the queue never ended.
And neither did the running.